>> this is three days. drivers getting angry, very, very angry. 88 deaths and at least 37 in new york city. why is it taking so long to fix this? i'll speak to one of the top people at con edison. residents are pleading for help of the storm that tossed boats around like toys. i'll talk to some of them in just a moment. and another huge storm could hit next week. i'll talk to chad myers about that. in the wake of a superstorm, climate change. and five days until election day. listen to what mitt romney said in virginia beach earlier. >> would you want four more years where -- i think it will be helpful to have a president

who actually understands job creation. >> our cnn orc poll shows obama at 50 and romney at 48. we begin with one of the hardest hit areas from hurricane sandy, staten island where the death toll continues to rise. with me now is the assemblywoman of new york nicole malliotakis and another resident of staten island, anthony, who rescued his brother from the storm. welcome to you both. >> thank you very much. >> let me start with you, if i may, assemblywoman. this is what the staten island president james molinaro said about the red cross response. he said it's an absolute disgrace. he said he was so infuriated and outraged by the lack of help that you've been receiving. do you endorse what he said?

>> well, i think it was a sentiment of frustration this morning because we hadn't had seen a real response here in staten island but we had our senators out here today and i can say that the red cross is on the grounds right now. we have them at certain locations. giving food, giving water. and also our community has been out there collecting donated goods and distributing them out in the streets along the blocks that have certainly been devastated by the storm. >> homeland security along with the head of fema, some are saying a little too late for all of this. there's been three days of virtual inactivity there from emergency services and the reason it's so significant is that staten island, although relatively small compared to some of the other areas that are affected, has suffered nearly half of the human death toll, 19 people have died there out of a total of 44 for the whole of new york. again, assemblywoman, why do you think people haven't been bothering with staten island?

it seems to be one of the most ignored places and yet the most badly affected. >> i've got to tell you, you know, the lack of communication has been terrible. our cell phones aren't working. we're having a hard time communicating to city officials and i don't think the mayor or the other officials knew the devastation that was here until they came here and saw the damage. it's completely devastating. we have people here without food, water, clothes. i spent a day going up and down the streets in the new york beach session of of my district talking to the residents and they are just up in arms. the impact of the storm, i can't even describe. we've never faced anything like this before. >> how do people feel about the fact that the new york marathon is going to go ahead on sunday, starting in staten island, and will have to presumably be stopped by a lot of police and so on. do people there feel comfortable that this is going on? >> absolutely not.

i mean, myself, my colleagues, the residence here, we think it's an absolute disgrace. it's an insult to the people of this borough who are suffering such a tragedy. to want to do the marathon, i can't even understand why they want to do this. not only that, but to take away even one policeman from our borough, this disaster here, to supervise a marathon i think is a wrong move. we can't afford to give up any resources now and we're still helping people that need to be saved from their homes, that need to be evacuated. we have looters in the community. we need cops to be patrolling our streets. we have no street lights around here. and to take resources forth a marathon is just unbelievable. i don't even know where to begin with that. >> let me ask you, you're in your mid-30s, you rescued your brother from his truck during

the storm, had he to crawl out of the window literally to survive. first of all, how is he doing? >> he's doing good. he's been out here every day trying to help get everything helped out. he lived in this neighborhood for years so he's trying to do everything he can to help us as well as do his job. >> this isn't the first time you've suffered a great hardship in the city. your aunt, i believe, died on 9/11. compared to the events and the aftermath of 9/11, how do you view what is happening in staten island? >> right now we all need help. like we need as much help as we can down here. it's not right, like everybody is down here, we're all helping each other but we need more people to come down here and help. we need as much as we can. >> it sounds like there's a critical emergency there that needs critical attention. i'm glad you've both come on the show tonight. i appreciate you sparing the

time. i wish you the best with the operation and hopefully you will get the help that you clearly desperately need. thank you both very much. >> thank you very much. thank you for the nypd and all of our first responders. >> yeah, i would certainly go along with that. one of the most shocking and heartbreaking is the death of two young brothers. a woman got out with her two children and clung to a tree for hours and the man in the door refused to let them in. she threw a flower pot at the window and she survived but her children did not. some say the man wouldn't help them. >> police say that she came with her two sons, knocked on your door. >> no, sir. >> and had to be outside in the hurricane? >> no, sir. >> so you didn't see a woman with two children? >> i never saw anyone. i only saw a man.

he didn't come to the door. there's stairs in the back of the house and he was standing -- he must have been standing at the bottom of the stairs. >> and what did he do? >> he took a concrete flower pot. there were two of them. he threw one of them at the door. >> after you wouldn't let her in, she tried to break a window. so you're mistake citizen. >> no. i had to stay there all night. i sat all night with my back against the door in the kitchen. >> let me ask you, if a man threw the flower pot, did you let him in the house? >> he didn't ask to come in. did you help him? >> what could i do to help him? i had a pair of shorts on with flip flops and i was going to come out -- >> so you did not see a woman and three children? >> no. >> you saw a man? >> yes. >> you must feel terrible for this woman and two children, right? >> they found them dead. >> of course, it's a tragedy. of course, absolutely. it's unfortunate. she shouldn't have been out, though.

it's one of those things. >> gary tuchman joins me live. it was brandon moore and 4-year-old. absolutely a sad story and that interview was quite extra ordinary with that man. did you believe him, i suppose, is the obvious question? >> well, i think it's really important, piers, is whether i believe him or not, he he did acknowledge that there was a man who came by and the man threw something at his back door and he wasn't willing to help the man. so he does acknowledge not trying to help somebody. he said there wasn't a woman with her two children. there was a man. is he covering up the story? either way we know he didn't help somebody. >> i suppose all you could say it's possible in the defense in the chaos that was going on, clearly very frightening. if he thought it was a man throwing things at his house, in the fog of what was happening he merely realized but certainly the way you conducted the interview with him it seemed to

me like he was hiding something. what is the reaction from the community as to what has happened there? >> reporter: well, our initial reaction was from the police on the scene. they told us off camera after they found the two bodies of the two children, one of the officers told me, i want this guy to be charged with a crime who wouldn't let this woman and her two children inside the house. now, it made us wonder, could you be charged with such a crime and what we found out from legal experts, it's not a crime not to help. it's an ethical problem, a moral problem but apparently you can't be charged criminally for such action. >> well, it certainly will happen, he did reject that lady and she went on to lose her two children. it's a crime against humanity. gary, for now, thank you very much indeed. and now i'll turn to new jersey. entire communities are wiped

out. new york mayor cory booker has been on my show every night. welcome back. >> thank you, piers. >> i was reading your twitter earlier. you're actually inviting citizens in your area to come to your home and use your power facilities to charge up whatever they need, which is an extraordinary act by you, indicative that so many people are absolutely desperate for power. as the days go on, the emergency of that need accelerates all the time. >> yeah. as days go on, the endurance, the ability to withstand the lack of power, lack of food, warm clothing, showers, it all becomes more and more difficult to bear. look, there's a lot of people in newark showing signs of compassion and proactive service to their neighbors and my house borders a treat, a homestead

that does not have power and the neighbors are always looking after me because i'm so often not home, the least i can be do is offer my home to them. all over the city i'm seeing extra ordinary acts of kindness and goodness from people from one to another. i'm trying my best to live up to the standards that are being set in my city right now. >> i think the feeling we're getting, just generally from people who have lost the power, is that their patience is beginning to run very thin. a lot of anger, people feeling that they should be back with power. i guess it's the right time now to ask this now. do you think that people were prepared enough? the power companies, in particular? and are you satisfied that they are doing all they can to get people back to full power? >> you know, i'm going to spend time in the postmortem looking at prestorm preparedness. i'm working now here in my command center and i'll tell you, they have been taking a lot

of abuse. but the reality is, this is the most i've seen psg&e in terms of fanning out all over the city. my citizens are frustrated, there's a lot of anger out there. half of my city is still without power but the work that they are doing, the tree cutting people, neighborhood services, police and others is pretty extraordinary and i'll give you one example. we had to rescue on the night of the storm. we had to rescue psg&e, an employee from a switching station and pull them back. when they came back, what they dealt with was a complete disaster that fed two major intersections of my city to the north and the east. they have over 100 electricians in this one small space working around the clock to repair it. so i don't want to beat up on them right now. the reality is, and these are individual workers who show up every day and frankly have been working without sleep, they are pouring their heart and soul into it. i think we need to pull together

and talk about the immediate see and urgency of the problem. we can all beat up on each other later on. i could have done things better, my command staff we will learn things that we can improve in the future. right now i have over 100,000 people without power who have urgent needs, food, be including medicine, who need a lot of the basics and all we're doing right now is trying to get the power restored as quickly as possible. and in the meantime, service those individuals by doing diaper run and more. >> cory booker, as always, thank you for appreciating me. i really appreciate it. >> i appreciate the coverage you're giving to this crisis. >> it's the least i can do. thank you very much. it's a ripple effect and we're seeing huge gas lines and there is fears that gas prices could go sky high. ali velshi is joining me.

there was suspicion that it had to do with a lack of supply but i believe that is not the case? >> reporter: no. there's enough gas in the northeast. there's refineries that are down and if they don't come up soon enough -- they escaped most damage but if they don't come up soon enough we will have a problem. pipeline is coming back on line. there's no gasoline problem. the problem is, you can't fill tankers without power. it takes power to put gas into a car. the tankers are running into traffic problems and problems with downed trees and power lines, can't get to some of the gas stations and even if they can, most gas stations don't have electricity. they don't have back-up generators. long island is 60, 65%. bottom line is, it all has to do with the electricity problem. once it's back on line, they can pump those taverners and get to

the gas stations and this is affecting people who need that gasoline and diesel to power not only their cars but generators to keep them warm, piers. >> i've seen it, huge lines at the gas and taxis beginning to stop working because they are running out of gas. i will speak to someone from coned later. for now, ali, thank you very much. >> reporter: okay. will sandy change everything election day? jennifer granholm will be here and i have a lot more on hurricane sandy and the aftermath, too. [ male announcer ] this is joe woods' first day of work.

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the day after the devastation with governor christie president obama was

back campaigning and five days to go until the election, jennifer granholm, former governor of michigan and republican strategist kellyanne conway, welcome to you both. >> thank you. >> let me start with you if i can, kellyanne. mitt romney a week ago was off a momentum and heading possibly to victory on tuesday. which ever way you look at this, this hasn't been a good few days for him politically. clearly the most important thing is the safety of the people involved. >> absolutely. >> and we accept that. but politically his momentum has stalled. the president has been out there being a president. >> it could be. but i'm with mayor booker and governor christie on this one, which is, it's so difficult to even a talk about politics at a time like this but you have tuesday coming up. you have early voting going on right now in the states. so the events in front of them, i think it can go either way.

people will either disassociate with the current events and how they feel for the last four years or they will do what voters sometimes do in times of uncertainty. and say there's uncertainty all around me, the stock market, hurricane, terrorism. why throw the captain off the ship now when there's so much uncertainty? so many things i can't control, let me hang on to the one thing that is there. i notice they are both going to campaign in earnest this weekend. >> it's going to be a big weekend. >> it is. >> jobs report tomorrow. jennifer granholm, this is the last one before the election. if this is good news for obama in any way, he would be already be riding on the back of momentum from his very presidential performance. if it's bad news, it could throw the debate right back to jobs and the economy which is mitt romney's strong point in this election as it runs to its conclusion. >> well, it doesn't seem that the news is going to be all that

bad even if it is bad because the aap numbers indicated that there were more -- there was more hiring. obviously the trajectory has been good, both on the political side with the polls as well as on the economy. you have the stock market rebounding, you've got manufacturing now at a 15-year high. the numbers out of the manufacturing sector are very good. so much of that attributable to the saving of the auto industry. so i think the momentum clearly is on the president's side and i think a lot of the early voting numbers that we are seeing where the president has a huge advantage in many of these swing states, if not all of them, attributable again to his ground game, i think that the numbers are getting to be baked in a bit. >> they are. the one thing that stood out to me is the washington post abc poll, 48.56% obama, 48.49 romney. i mean, literally, negligible

and even in the swing states it's too close to call. i don't think that's true. i think it's true on some of the national polls but they are not as relevant as the swing state polls and you're seeing incremental increases every day in favor of the president. so i think, you know, honestly, it's going to be a good day on tuesday for the president and therefore for the country. >> how damaging, kelly ann, was mayor bloomberg's endorsement of president obama? he's been holding off endorsing anybody. he's been well known to be an independent. he came out very strong and said president obama he believes in climate change and mitt romney doesn't. he also attacked mitt romney for where i believe the vulnerability is the endless flip-flopping. it's not a good thing that he endorses a former republican mayor, somebody totally

influential, endorses a democratic president. >> he's been a republican and democrat and an independent. so i guess he has the luxury of endorsing anyone. i thought it was an unnecessary endorsement. i don't say that because he endorsed president obama. he has an entire paragraph in there taking obama on for you'll of his failures. you haven't done anything for deficit reduction, for balancing the budget, for jobs creation. those are the issues that most voters say are determines their choice in this election and then, of course, he said it was about climate change and global warming but at the end he had the usual litany of marriage and abortion. also, it was all over the map and i just thought it was an ill-timed unnecessary endorsement when his city is suffering. >> five days before the general election. he's allowed to endorse -- >> and swing from new york to all the way to obama. >> i think he made a very important point, which is that

hurricane sandy, the greatest storm that new york has ever seen in his life time may well be linked to global warming. jennifer granholm, last words with you? >> absolutely. it was a tipping point moment for him and what he is saying is that this storm should be a wake-up call across the nation and the person who will have a clean energy plan to be able to mitigate. so damages of us closing our eyes to climate change is barack obama. mitt romney has completely denied it. so i think it's a moment. the president gives his endorsement, colin powell's ad who is a republican run aring in these states from a persuasion point of view and then you have chris christie standing next to him. for all of those who are independent or moderate republicans, certainly they are going to take a second look at the president. >> we'll see what kind of margin president obama gets among republicans. but, governor, he's way behind in the swing states from 2008. >> we will find out in five days.

it's going to be fascinating. next, growing anger over the massive blackouts. when will the lights go back on? i'll speak with the spokesman from coned when we come back after this break. the blackout continues and a r visibly reduces fine lines and wrinkles in just one week. why wait if you don't have to. neutrogena®. >> announcer: you never know when, but thieves can steal your identity and turn your life upside down. >> hi. >> hi. you know, i can save you 15% today if you open up a charge card account with us. >> you just read my mind. >> announcer: just one little piece of information and they can open bogus accounts, stealing your credit, your money and ruining your reputation. that's why you need lifelock to relentlessly protect what matters most... [beeping...] helping stop crooks before your identity is attacked. and now you can have the most comprehensive identity theft protection available today... lifelock ultimate. so for protection you just

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the blackout continues and a spokesman for con edison is on the phone with me. >> hi. good evening. >> never mind anybody else in new york homeless wondering when the hell they are getting their power back. what do you say to people who are on day four with now power and can't use water or anything? >> it's an extraordinary ordeal that everyone is going through and we're working very hard to get the power back on as quick as we can. for those in manhattan, about south of 39th street we should have everybody back by saturday. extensive damage due to the flooding from the storm that surged up over our protection to the substation on the east side. for everybody else, it's going to be really tough but we're going to have to probably go through the end of next week to the weekend. we've got -- you know, we

started with 900,000 customer outages, that represents many more people. these are metered customer accounts. the scope of this storm is so enormous, i'm thinking about it this way. it was the equivalent of having four hurricanes at once. >> right. let me jump in, if i may. >> sure. >> everyone knew this was coming. i'm going to interview somebody in a moment who is a mother of a young baby who was taken out into the hurricane from one of the hospitals that ran out of power because their generators failed. i've heard the same thing from the hospital administrators, it was so unexpected, unprecedented. it wasn't unexpected for a week everyone was being told, this is going to be the big one. this could be the worst storm that ever hit new york and the frustration that people feel in new york is mounting anger, i have to say, from the ones that i know, who are personally suffering, is why, given there

was a week to plan for the worst ever storm, are people now facing, as you've just said to me, two weeks without power. it just seems ridiculous. >> well, it may sound ridiculous but the fact is, we knew about the storm, too, and everyone was prepared but there's nothing much you can do once it comes ashore and you've got -- we serve nine million people here in new york city, a lot by overhead power lines, the trees are going to blow into the power lines and the power is going to go out. you have the raging floodwaters that came in two feet higher that came over the walls. we built protections for the substations a foot and a half higher than the most historic storm surge ever to hit new york and it still couldn't handle it. i mean, this was just off the charts and unfortunately we are where we are and unfortunately just like all of the other utilities up and down the east coast right now, trying to recover and get everybody back as quick as we can. >> i appreciate you coming on the show and i hope you can get everybody back in manhattan and as you say the wider area it

could be another week. can you guarantee that everybody will be back on a week by saturday, for instance? >> we're saying that we're going to get almost everybody. virtually everyone back by next weekend and then there will still be more to go after that. unfortunately, with storms like this, with -- you're talking about trees going into power lines, coming down and they -- you know, what we do is we concentrate on restoring the people where we can get the most people back the quickest. in other words, looking back the lines that can get 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 people back at once and then work our way down to those that will restore a couple of hundred people. >> i appreciate that. it's obviously a monumental task and i know the people that you have working out there are dealing with very difficult conditions. i appreciate you coming on and giving us a deadline that people can can work towards. so thank you.

joining me now is jo-an and among the superstorm at the height of the power, her baby was born prematurely was carried down nine flights. welcome. >> thank you. >> this is every mother's nightmare, isn't it? your little boy was born at the end of august prematurely and had been kept in the hospital. you were obviously seeing him regularly. you went that night. what happened? >> well, shortly after 7:30 or 8:00 the power went out. so the entire floor of the hospital went pitch black. i was walking towards the pod where my son was at and i just went straight to his bed and one of the nurses instructed me to grab my son and make sure that he was breathing. >> terrifying. >> yes, quite. thankfully, the blackout happened when the nurses were changing shifts so we got really

lucky and had more than a shift's worth of nurses present and clearly some went home earlier. >> you stayed, i believe, until 3:00 a.m. and then in rushed firemen and other emergency services saying, grab your baby and get out now? >> we need to go now, yeah. >> what were you thinking? there was a hurricane raging outside? >> yeah. up until that point, i was questioning as to whether we really needed to go out at the height of the storm or what i thought was the height of the storm at the time and it was -- you know, it came to light shortly after that that there may or may not have been an incident on the sixth floor of nyu involving a fire that caused the fire department and the police department to basically evacuate us at a moment's notice. >> you were carried down nine floors? >> yes. jackson was. i wasn't. i actually was carrying his bag

that his nurse who was ironically called sandy had packed. >> the nurses, i've got to say, have been doing an extraordinarily job down there, bellevue as well. >> yeah, absolutely. the nyu nurses and doctors, my heart goes out to them. they really stepped up to the plate and -- >> it was scary because you were taken to the wrong hospital first, right? >> yeah. i mean, when things happen like this, it's just tough to get all of the facts right and we were put in an ambulance after we were escorted from the lobby and taken to the wrong hospital and the wrong children's hospital. it was an easy mistake to make but at that time i was just so exhausted, i just wanted my baby to be placed on a monitor so company see if he was fine. >> and he is fine? >> he is fine, yes. >> and you have a lot to be grateful to for the staff at both hospitals.

however, i for the last two nights have been with the administrators over the fact that their generators failed as one of the victims of this failure and your son could have been in big trouble moving out into a hurricane at 3:00 a.m. what do you feel about the fact that the back-up generators failed? >> i'm quite upset, actually. at the end of the day we rely on the hospital to make decisions that won't put their patient at harm's way and i don't feel that was done to the extent that it should have been. i'm sure that a lot of things have happened with this experience, you know, and maybe next time they will find a consequence and that was not the case on monday. >> very scary experience for you. he's two months old. i wish you the best. >> thank you. >> extraordinary story. i can't imagine anything else as a parent. i'm glad it turned out well for

you. >> thank you, piers. chad myers talks to me about a major new storm that could wreak havoc on the east coast next week.

there are now reports of a major storm after election week. chad, welcome back. >> thank you, wolf -- >> wolf? >> am i growing a beard? we'll move on from that. let's move on to the storm. >> yeah. >> i'll try and recover. >> i just wasted 15 seconds. we've got a big ridge in the west and a big trough in the east and that allows it to be cold. the cold air, you can go outside of the studio and it's there. low pressure system comes over the ridge and through the trough, they can turn into nor'easters and the forecast for the same computer, from the same computer that came with the hurricane model is now taking a storm up the east coast and into new york city. now, this is not a hurricane. this is a nor'easter. it could even be wrong. we can't get nor'easters right 24 hours in advance. this is six days away.

it's a possibility and it's a potential for winds of 40 and rain and more cold weather that people certainly -- they just don't need, piers. >> it's the last thing everybody needs and let's hope that it diverts. chad, thanks for now. i almost called you rob marciano but let's move on. new york mayor bloomberg talks about global warming and endorses president obama today because of it. pat michaels is director of the cato institute and i'm joined by nick kristof of the times. you are skeptical that any of this that we've seen from hurricane sandy and the other big weather interventions over the last year is much to do with climate change. why? >> well, first of all, you know, the planet is warmer than it was and people have something to do with it and the ocean is warmer than it was 40 years ago.

you would think that everything else being equal that would result in a frequency or power. and that's one thing we can look at to see if it's happening. now, i have an illustration that i gave over there that shows something called the accumulated cyclone energy beginning in 1972. that's when satellites began to go up so we can sense all of the hurricanes. and it shows no change between 1972 and now. in fact, if you look at the data, the recent years are at or near the lowest value for hurricane energy in the entire record. >> you have been watching this saying, that's all very well but we've just been hit by the biggest storm that anybody can remember. also, mayor bloomberg said in all of his life time he's never known a year for such extremity of weather. that's certainly my impression. i've been in america for six, seven years. i've never known anything quite like this.

the statistics are pretty bleak. nick, let me bring you in here. you are a firm believer in climate change being responsible for this? >> yes. i think one thing that we in the media do wrong is a we cover this as a controversy and we bring one person on this side and one person on that side and with the greatest respect -- pat michaels is a great outlier since 1992 he has been on the fringe of this view, not publishing in scientific journals so much as being tried for tv shows like this. it's a disservice to viewers about climate change. there certainly are real genuine disagreements but climate change itself is something that is pretty much settled at this point. >> there's a quote from a piece

i think you wrote today and it came from james hansen, a scientist. he said there is virtually no explanation other than climate change. >> yeah. and we have better data on temperatures aside from that of course we have the drought this summer which is the worst in 50 years. it's impossible to say if any one event was caused by climate change but certainly the models and practicality do seem to be aligned in suggesting that we're getting more of the extreme events in one kind or another. >> patrick michaels, the scientists are saying that you're talking baloney. >> first of all -- >> here's what is worrying to

people that do believe in it, and in nick's article, the number of articles about climate change fell from 41%. there's a conspiracy of silence about this even when all of the science points for it to be true. >> i have to correct nick, i'm sorry, piers. i have published several papers on hurricane climate change. i'm looking at one from a few years ago. and in that we estimated that we would see an 8% increase in the number of severe tropical cyclones by the time we got to the end of the century. i don't know where he got that. and the other thing is, we have to be fact-based. this accumulated cyclone energy index, ryan from weather bell analytics, probably the best tropical meteorology school in the world, it's the number. it shows the power of hurricanes and it just doesn't show a change since we started looking at it in 1972. i have nothing to do with that. >> on that one point, what do you say? >> we have very limited data series on hurricanes. so -- >> every one since 1972.

>> we have much better data, much longer series on temperature and on sea rise and certainly there is an agreement, international panel on climate change, for example, they have a low -- pretty low common denominator for what they can agree to. what they have agreed to is we can experience more greater hurricanes, not a greater frequency. >> for a moment, mr. michaels, you're out of power at the moment? >> i am. i was watching the coned's spokesman? >> were you satisfied with that explanation? >> as consumer, i want it on immediately. >> a lot of people i know, if this happened in britain, it would have been a few weeks before anything was back on. so new yorkers are inpatient but do you think they have a right to be angry? >> i think coned for now, i think they are scrambling.

we have to do a much better job in adapting to what i think is going to be a new normal, whether that's in agriculture, where we put houses in coastal areas and in building more resilient systems, our electrical grid is way behind the times and i think it's in it that planning sector that we can fault coned and everybody else. >> for now, thank you both very much, indeed. the president speaking in denver right now. >> thanks for the service and sacrifice of our brave --

"the new york times" op-ed columnist charles blum and ross darfet. welcome back to you both. with all we've heard tonight, the obvious question is has hurricane sandy had a big affect you think on the way the election result will go on tuesday, charles, we'll start with you? >> i don't think so. but you can game it out a number of different ways. i went back and looked at the counties where the storm happened, the biggest effect. and how the particular counties voted in 2008. and it's a real mixed bag. so a lot of the coastal

counties, particularly in new jersey, were red counties, went for mccain. some of them where they were closer to big cities, obama counties. you also have to look at it and say big cities are more able to adjust for these sorts of things, kind of vacation community, those sorts of community may not be able to adjust as quickly. you may be disenfranchising or pushing people out of the voting process who are more likely to be republican. you have to look at age differences of those who might have been affected. if you are a younger voter, maybe rumor able to get over the hurdles to get to a new place. if you are an older voter who tend to be more republican, you may not be able to do that, go three polling stations over from where you have gone your entire life to cast the ballot. i live in new york city. we -- my -- the evacuation center is on my block. that's also the polling place. have you all of these people in a polling place that will be

there on tuesday. >> i heard in new jersey, a lot of polling booths, people can't get to. it will be an interesting week. ross, let me come to you. which ever way you look at this, it's not been a helpful thing for mitt romney. he has to divorce the politics from the more important story of the hurricane. all of the momentum, he was looking like he may be favored before this happened and now obama has had the benefit of the air time, because he's the president. he's being very presidential. good leader, all of the right things. that has to help with the overall image right now, of the man in charge, the commander in chief. >> well, i think that is certainly what you will hear from the romney campaign if you ultimately lose. i think you will hear a lot of people on team romney, we had the momentum, the storm came along, a freak thing. it cost us a week of air time, so on.

i'm skeptical. if you look back a week ago, the race pretty much stabilized with a tie or narrow romney lead in the polls and this steady persistence lagged. and if you look at the tracking polls this week, maybe there has been a tiny bit of movement toward the president, but maybe just statistical noise. my instinct is that ultimately, where the race was a week ago is probably where it will end up and as big a story as the hurricane has been, it isn't a story that tells us something new about one of the candidates and the way that they -- say, george w. bush's famous dui story came out just before the 2000 race did. i think you will hear a lot of romney people blame the storm if he loses, but i tend to think that where we were before the storm is where we'll end up. >> i have to leave with you this tweet. ricky gervais tweeted. just arrived back at my new york home. still the greatest city in the world. f you, sandy. welcome back, ricky.

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